


morning never suspected

by pimpam



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Gen, spain nt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 15:47:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12368961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pimpam/pseuds/pimpam
Summary: David Villa gets called up to the national team after three years.  Everything's changed but then again nothing has.





	morning never suspected

**Author's Note:**

  * For [guti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/guti/gifts).



David caught the 11:59pm flight from JFK to Barajas. It was a direct, and he’d argued up and down with the coordinator from RFEF about the benefits and drawbacks of taking a red-eye. But he’d wanted to have dinner with his kids before setting off, and with the time difference, it really didn’t matter. He’d either sleep on the plane or end up exhausted by the time he landed. Probably both. 

They were called La Roja but the national color of Spain should actually have been yellow. The plains were a golden yellow, and there was a scorched color to the mountain peaks. He’d noted that before when flying back with Patricia to visit family, and then there were the fields of _ginesta_ on the bus routes between Barcelona and Valencia. 

That night, the flight attendant roused him about an hour before landing. He watched the lights of Madrid grow closer as he sipped a cup of fizzy water and tried to wake up. The scenery, that which was visible at all, seemed blue, black, and impossibly far below. He was through customs by 1, being driven through Madrid by 1:30, and settling into bed by 2:15. Las Rozas had been updated marginally in the three years since his last call up. The rooms had different sheets, there was a different generic piece of art hanging on the wall. From a frame on the wall, an abstract of a flamenco dancer stared at David as he drifted off, finally to sleep.

In his dreams he could see the yellow lights of the Mestalla, and sun-gold skin on a training pitch.

At 7:31am, David woke up to Pepe Reina beating down his door. 

“Oh good, you’re awake,” he said, pushing past David into the small room. “I think this is bigger than mine. Lucky bastard, getting the red carpet treatment.”

“I’m awake because you woke me,” David replied, trying to keep a familiar smile off his face. He wasn’t amused, really. He was still half-unconscious. He rubbed sleep from his eye half for effect.

Pepe smiled, wide and self-satisfied. “Someone had to. And the kids are all a bit afraid of you. Silva’s told them it’s stupid but,” he shrugged, “no sense between them.”

Breakfast was lighter than in America. He filled his tray up with little pastries coffee, and some fruit. He moved carefully through the canteen like a kid in secondary school looking for his table in a hostile lunchroom, settling uneasily with Pepe and Silva at the far end. He looked across the room at the swath of vaguely-familiar face, half-known to him from satellite broadcasts and short articles read through the bluish glow of his smart phone. 

Pepe jostled him intentionally, Silva smiled a bemused smile which seemed utterly unaffected by the passage of time. Across the room he heard Piqué’s obnoxious laugh and looked in vain across the sea of young faces for Cesc.

“You’re not eating much,” Silva pointed with his nose at David’s plate. Pepe smirked.

“He’s old now. Probably gotten irregular.” 

David jostled him back on principle. “Food’s different and I got five hours sleep. Screw you.”

Pepe blew a kiss at him. “You wouldn’t be able to handle me.”

Silva smiled across the table at them both. Across the room from them, Geri tormented someone with a fresh face David only half-knew. David sipped his coffee.

“Who’s your roommate?” Silva inquired quietly from behind his own cup. 

“Don’t know yet,” David replied quickly.

“I have Kepa,” Pepe said easily. David raised his eyebrows. He didn’t know Kepa. Or he didn’t remember him.

“New kid, Basque. Plays in Milan, I think,” he explained.

“What are you going to do to him?” 

Pepe smiled, bowing his head conspiratorially. “Dunno. Thinking about food coloring in his toothbrush.”

“Now now, play nice,” Silva chided, moving one piece of cantaloupe halfway around his plate. David reached for his coffee and their knuckles brushed together. Silva glanced across at him from under his impossibly long lashes.

“I will,” he replied easily. Silva stared back at him steadily.

“No, I mean it.” He said, almond eyes intense. “They’re kids and they idolize you. Don’t be an asshole.”

The moment lasted too long to be comfortable. Pepe grunted somewhat uncomfortably and Geri guffawed across the room and abruptly it passed.

That afternoon he stretched with Silva, Pepe disappeared off with the other keepers. Lazily he leaned back into the fresh-cut grass, looking over in their general direction as Silva pushed his leg into a hard flex. 

“I miss Iker,” he said, watching De Gea roll into a save. Above him Silva snorted.

“I miss Raúl,” he countered, not quite aggressively. “Give me your other leg.” Obediently, David shifted and they began again. “People get older.”

“Xavi, too,” he said, turning to his other side to watch Iniesta in a similar position with one of the younger kids from Barça he didn’t know now. Sergi something. Talented, but probably not as much as the ones who were missing.

“Times change, the team moves on.” Silva’s tone was at once challenging and slightly resigned. “My turn,” he gestured absently for them to switch places.

David frowned. “It’s just weird,” he said, a bit annoyed that Silva was denying the transformation its proper reverence.

“Weirder when you’ve watched it happen,” Silva settled into the grass as David picked himself up, back arching as he made himself comfortable. Within a few seconds they were situated again and David was pressing hard on Silva’s foot as the younger man’s leg leaned up against him. “Harder, please. I like this one.”

David couldn’t help but smirk as he leaned further into it. “I remember.”

There was a pause, and irrational though it was, David was almost certain some of the color drained from world around them. 

“Don’t,” Silva replied simply, staring off to one side at nothing in particular.

He cooled down with Ramos after training, the little Madridistas he didn’t know thankfully giving them a wide breadth. David watched one, Marco, he thought, chatting amiably with the new golden boy, Morata. Silva had disappeared somewhere.

“It’s good to have you back, you know,” Ramos’s accent had changed, the Andalusian lilt diminished, standardized, smoothed-over by years in Madrid and more attention from press officials. David smiled, but kept jogging, not entirely sure either way.

“I mean it,” Ramos continued. “The team needs stability, and if that means pulling some of you bastards out of retirement, I’m for it.”

His head inclined challengingly, baiting David to respond.

“America isn’t retirement,” he replied simply.

“Sure,” Ramos said with a tight smile. “But it isn’t Spain, either.”

No, it wasn’t, David bristled. But sometimes that was a good thing. “Maybe, but the refs are better. They’d just ban you.”

“I hope they call up Xabi next time, his jokes are better,” but Ramos still laughed.

David slept uneasily that afternoon, weirdly concerned that he’d wake up to find food coloring or gum numbing paste in his toothbrush.

There was a yellow building on the Paseo de la Castellana. It came after the Prado but before the Nuevos Ministerios and David used to watch for it whenever he would drive through that part of Madrid. It looked like an office building, or maybe a boutique hotel, with a courtyard and ivy growing up one side. Stately and vaguely old world. As they drove to the Bernabéu he watched for it out the window. Beside him, Silva’s right leg pressed not uncomfortably up against his left.

Ramos played flamenco pop in the dressing room, which wasn’t in itself unfamiliar, but David had never much liked the Bernabéu anyway. It was a visceral sort of thing that didn’t change, even when he was dressing on the ‘home’ side (and that in itself felt weird). This was every bit Ramos’s home though, and the freshly (to David’s mind) anointed captain danced around with glee, his deputies Lukas and Marco following close behind. Pepe looked warily around as he tucked in his shirt, as if he could sense the hostile madridismo seeping in from the florescent lights above them. Iniesta quietly laced his boots.

David was a substitute which meant he spent the first half watching a lively but mostly uneventful match. It was good, of course. The new kids on both sides were good. The Bernabéu was packed, and both sides were playing well, but not spectacularly. Italy was missing key pieces, legends from days gone by who seemed to yet loom over the pitch. If the Bernabéu weren’t creepy enough, that night it seemed damn near haunted.

Lopetegui gave a standard managerial speech at the half, perfectly serviceable but one David had heard a few times over. He stood on the sidelines with Pepe, the old guard watching the young warriors as they panted and tried to wipe away the sweat of the warm Spanish summer air with little effect. Ramos said a few words. They were nice, commanding and vaguely inspiring. It was funny to think about now, David thought idly, but Ramos without his stupid long hair and all his ridiculous tattoos did make a pretty decent captain. Not like Iker, but decent, he supposed.

“... Julen's not gonna put you in if you keep staring into space.” Silva said, shoulder checking David as they made their way back on the pitch. “What’s up?”

He smiled distantly up at David, euphoric in the way that only the heat of a match and running for 45 straight minutes could be. 

“Thinking,” David replied, shoulder checking him back. “That’s all”

“If you come in and score,” Silva leaned heavily against him. It all seemed somehow out of place. The right people in the wrong space. “You should dedicate it to me.”

“Deal,” he said, before turning to take his seat on the bench.

He did end up coming in, a last minute sub almost literally. He didn’t score, but Madrid, even if it wasn’t this Madrid, had been his home once, and David’s name was chanted through the Bernabéu once again. It wasn’t enough, really, to leave his mark on the match. But the late summer air felt hot and burnt his lungs as he breathed in, and the grass felt correct beneath his feet. He danced past Italian defenders but couldn’t find the right angle on the ball. Isco and Morata had done more than enough to earn them the points. By the time David came on it was all a bit of window dressing. Still, it felt good, it felt right. Not mismatched, or like he was somehow pretending to be something he’d lost a long time ago. At least on the pitch, everything still made sense.

Later that night, he and Pepe and Silva sat to one side of a big room and watch the younger guys celebrating. They had every reason to, they were going to Russia. Pepe sipped a beer absently, and Silva feigned bemusement, David found himself lost in thought again, moments from years before replaying themselves in his head, but distant and out of sequence somehow.

They slinked off to bed early, leaving Geri and Ramos to wrangle the youngsters. They could do that now. It was weird to think of it that way, but Geri and Ramos had gone from problem children to responsible adults. And, grimly, David half suspected that anything these new brats could do, they of all people could handle.

Sleepily, he draped an arm over Silva’s shoulders. The younger man tensed for a moment but didn’t shake him off.

“Guaje, can I ask something?” His voice was slurred with fatigue and the beer he hadn’t finished. David focused on it as they meandered through the halls.

“Shoot,” 

“Are you glad you came back?” Silva watched him sideways from under long lashes. David had a love/hate regard for those lashes and it had troubled him now for decade.

“How do you mean?” He asked tiredly, not at all confused but delaying the inevitable.

Silva chewed his lip for a second. They were still rough and absently, David realized he'd never broken the nervous habit in all their years apart. They turned down another hall. He didn’t know if they were going to their rooms anymore, or just wandering in an attempt to escape the evidence of their planned obsolescence.

“It’s different. It might not be what you remember.”

David sighed, half-annoyed at having to address directly what he’d been pondering for days.

“It’s not,” he said after a deep breath. “But it’s what it needs to be now, I think.”

Silva eyed him carefully, watching with an almost feline expression for any hint of disingenuousness. Apparently finding none, he leaned up against David a little more.

“Yeah,” he replied sleepily. “Still I’m glad.” 

Silva yawned and they turned another corner and suddenly David found himself at his door.

“This is me,” he said. A less mature part of him wanted to keep wandering. Let the night, and consequently the day preceding it, last forever. Silva nodded. For a moment, the motion left him blurred and haloed by the yellow light of the hall.

“Good night, Guaje. Sleep well.”

“You too,” he said, before turning back into his room.

**Author's Note:**

> For @guti. Sorry it isn't longer or better. Also sorry it isn't really funny. I wanted humor and ended up vaguely bittersweet. Title comes from a Robert Frost quotation, "the afternoon knows what morning never suspected", because sometimes I like to pretend I'm deep.
> 
> <3


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